Shaking things up: Exchanging Notes project

Victoria Kinsella is a senior research fellow in creativities at Birmingham City University's (BCU) School of Education and Social Work.

What was your involvement in the project?

I was the principal investigator on the project, leading a team which was committed to evaluating Exchanging Notes (EN). We employed a research lens to the projects that were happening across the country, working with them to gather data. We held numerous reflection sessions with them over the four years to think about what they were doing and how to progress the programme.

What prompted the research?

Youth Music, which funded the four-year programme, wanted to examine the impact of the project on young people's educational progress and attainment, and really explore the notion of what a new model of partnership between schools and out-of-school music providers might look like. Before EN, it had conducted a research project called Communities of Music Education, which found that schools and out-of-school music providers needed to join up more. They wanted a research base which really supported projects over the four years and to then have some evidence to disseminate the work more widely and to have impact on policy and practice.

Why is this research important?

It was a worthwhile project to be involved with as it really explored two key issues. The National Plan clearly sets out that there needs to more joint approaches between schools and out-of-school music providers. The future of partnership working is something that we in education are going to have to think about. I was really interested to see how that would play out over a four-year longitudinal period, especially bearing in mind the current policy context of music education in schools and what that means for the curriculum within schools as well.

Part of the project was also about working with young people who were at risk of educational exclusion and as part of our work at BCU, we were really interested in youth voice and exploring the experiences of young people who might be at risk of educational exclusion.

One of the things that stood out for me was this idea of redefining success

We know that schools are kind of hemmed in by regulatory frameworks of assessment and performativity frameworks which can often impact how they measure success within the classroom, and that out-of-school music providers also have their own informal ways of measuring success of a project. What we found was that there seemed to be great understanding of what measures of success could look like.

Within the project we collected the young people's attainment and assessment data based on Music and English, and the music teachers continued to collect school data as normal. I would say that the teachers had a better understanding of success that extended beyond that which is collected by schools – stuff like well-being outcomes, the social outcomes of engaging in a project like this. For schools, it kind of brought to the fore that what's needed in education as a whole is that there needs to be a rethinking of what we consider success to be. It is not just a measure of attainment grades, that there are wider success factors. When we're talking about young people who are at risk of educational exclusion, that many of the participants were engaging in school was a major success factor.

Why do you think there was such a kneejerk reaction?

Unfortunately, the press framed it as either/or, when what the report was trying to say was that partnership work includes young people. What the projects did from the beginning was listen to young people's views, their musical interests, ask where their starting points were and then use that as a place to begin the curriculum with them. By doing that it really engaged them in school and in the music sessions. We know that music can be a deeply personal thing for young people, so using music that they were interested in was a really effective way of getting them to be engaged in the project. What happened throughout the project was that musical understanding and knowledge developed through a whole host of other range of musical genres and styles. It's not a case of Stormzy or Mozart, it's saying that an inclusive music curriculum should feature all genres of music.

In the report, one of the teachers comments about getting students to teach them?

Time was afforded for that within the sessions, and what happened within the four years was that the level of trust between the partners and the young people really developed. It really was a case of learning from and with one another.

Martin Fautley is director of research in the School of Education and Social Work at BCU.

What do you see as the project's success?

Victoria's talked about the success with those at risk but I think it's also revealed a wider issue, with young people who aren't necessarily at risk but who aren't engaged by some of their music lessons. I want to be very careful because it is only some and we've only got data on a very small amount. But some of the things that we were hearing about would apply more generally. What we now have is some data on what happens with particularly disaffected young people when a progamme is designed much more around their interests in music and what that does for them.

What are the next steps?

I think the whole music education community really needs to think about the purpose of KS3 Music. I'm especially keen to have practitioners involved because it's the people on the frontline every day that really need to be involved in this in this set of discussions.

The front page of the report

How do we do that?

EN shows us is that there is a huge appetite for children and young people to be interested and involved in music – that's something that we might want to think about capitalizing upon. There's a lot of washback that happens when the contents of the GCSE examinations syllabus impact what is taught at KS3. Only about 7% of young people go on to study GCSE music, so we need to examine if we're creating a curriculum for the 7%, to which the 93% just sort of hang on to by their fingertips. We're only going from the data in EN and extrapolating from it, but I do think that's an area that could be considered – Ofqual might want to be revisit what it deems acceptable in a GCSE examination. We're not saying that Mozart should go, but that maybe it would be helpful to have a broader view of what curriculum music is like.

What do you make of the reaction?

You always get those reactions and I'm convinced that these people don't have huge collections of Mozart, Haydn and Beethoven, it's just something they believe should be held up as a paragon. Classroom music teachers are well aware of what to do, but you have those looking in and saying that music lessons ought to be preserving this great western classical music heritage. Maybe one of the things for education to do is to start where the pupils are and then take them somewhere else. One of the things that has been missed in all this, is that these are young people who are seriously at danger of never completing their education. If a bit of grime and hip hop keeps them in school and they do their GCSEs in English and Maths, then I see that as a win-win situation.

For more information on the project, including the full report, please visit tinyurl.com/mt7-ExchangingNotes.